This spring and summer your Vestry has been reading Mark Elsdon’s book We Aren’t Broke: Uncovering Hidden Resources for Mission and Ministry. Elsdon’s primary argument is that churches and faith communities have more resources than they realize and often neglect to utilize those latent resources as alternative sources of revenue and mission. In his own setting, a campus ministry in the Midwest that no longer had students, they converted the parking lot of their worship space to a high-rise apartment building for students, with designated intentional communities for students. The rental income from the apartments became a revenue stream that supported both the housing ministry and the worshiping community that emerged. Whether churches repurpose their existing buildings for coworking space, redesignate green space for affordable housing, or simply rent their land for use by a business like a childcare center, Elsdon’s argument is that churches have an abundance at their fingertips that they rarely recognize or utilize.
As our Vestry has been dreaming about abundance and creative repurposing of resources, I have been seeing a lot of parallels from Elsdon’s vision and today’s gospel lesson. Because every gospel has a version of the Jesus’ miracle of feeding a mass of people, and because this story is beloved, we sometimes gloss over this story without really hearing the story. As scholar Karoline Lewis argues, “…a comparison of John and the Synoptic Gospels yields important differences and underscores particular theological themes in the Gospel of John. The setting has a specific detail unique to John: that of much grass (6:10). This description alludes to and foreshadows the presentation of Jesus as the Good Shepherd in chapter 10. The pasture for the sheep signals provision and abundance of life and this abundance is clearly present in the feeding of the five thousand.”[i] In a place where there is abundant space, where an enormously abundant amount of people gets to eat until they are full, and there is an abundance of leftovers – twelve whole baskets to be exact – Jesus gives us insight into the abundant life that is found in him.
But abundant thinking is not how most of us are hardwired. As one pastor describes, “Much of the time our faith mirrors that of Philip and Andrew, who could not see past the six months’ wages or the meager five loaves and two fish. We tend to base our living on our own scarcity or even on our own fears of insufficiency. So we hoard and save and worry and end up living life in small and safe measures. We pull back when we should push forward. We give in to our fear of a shortfall rather than exercising faith in God’s abundance. But Christians are constantly on call to go places where we have never been, to do things that we have never attempted, and to be things we have never envisioned.”[ii]
For those of you who have been around the Episcopal Church very long, you may know that we have something called “the reserve sacrament” – a fancy phrase for leftover communion. When we celebrate the Great Thanksgiving, if any wine or bread is leftover, we set the elements aside in a safe place – in the New Chapel, we use the aumbry. We then use the reserve sacrament the next week, or when your clergy take communion out to our homebound members. But the holy meal we consume each week rarely needs that reserve. I remember distinctly being asked once to come and deliver communion to a dying parishioner. I came with a few reserve wafers in my kit and my flask of reserve wine. But when I arrived, there were probably ten to twelve people in the room. And although I expected some of them to say, “Oh, no thanks – no communion for me,” they all wanted to consume. And so, I found myself making tiny wafers even tinier so that everyone might share the sacred meal with their grandma one last time.
Now, I am not suggesting Jesus gave super tiny bites to everyone on that huge area of “much grass.” In fact, John’s gospel says they don’t just get what they need, they get as much bread and fish as they want – and there are still leftovers! What I am saying is, Jesus is inviting us today to see with eyes of abundance. To look at a room full of grieving people and figure out a way to make much bread out of little. To talk to a business owner who serves our community and see what creative ways we can use our blessings to bless others. To know that there is a shortage of housing for the workforce in our community and imagine if some of our property might be the solution. I have been to enough potluck dinners at churches in my lifetime that we almost never finish every morsel of food – in fact, usually we are all taking at least a portion or two home of what we brought. Jesus is inviting us into being a potluck community: to see the abundance all around us, to remember where that abundance comes from, and to live and love abundantly in ministry without fear of scarcity. As one scholar says, Jesus “…gives bread because he is Bread. He makes possible the gathering of the body so that we might become his body, the church.”[iii] Our invitation is to honor his generous, abundant legacy in the way we live, move, and have our being – as His Church in the world. Amen.
[i] Karoline Lewis, John: Fortress Biblical Preaching Commentaries (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), 83.
[ii] Charles Hoffman, “More than Enough,” Christian Century, July 25, 2006, vol. 123, no. 15, 18.
[iii] Debie Thomas, “The Miracle of Gathering,” July 18, 2021, as found at https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/3081-the-miracle-of-gathering on July 26, 2024.
Seeking and Serving 